Wireless digital networks, such as networks operating under the current Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standards, are spreading in their popularity and availability. In a WLAN deployment, there could be multicast-based service discovery protocols, such as, multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) and/or Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP), proxy implementation that builds service database of mDNS and/or SSDP capable devices. Each of servicing network devices will present on Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) that are visible to it by making periodical announcement of its services using multicast network packets in the WLAN.
Information regarding the servicing network devices will be cached by a network controller device in a service database. Based on the content of the service database, the network system may apply various policies to customize and/or restrict services. Specifically, the servicing network device can terminate incoming queries, and respond to them by looking into its own database and applying policies, such as time-based policies, role-based policies, location-based policies, and so on. This mechanism allows visibility of servicing network devices to client devices based on information associated with the client devices, for example, a user name, a role, a time, a location, etc.
Current location-based service discovery mechanism restricts the service filtering to radio frequency (RF) neighborhood of an access point (AP), to an entire floor, or to an AP group. If a client device is associated with an AP that is within the RF neighborhood of the server's shared AP, the location is considered to be matching and access will be granted. The WLAN cannot control this kind of proximity-based location sharing in a specific or customized region.
Based on the wireless signal strength, WiFi bandwidth, interference level, and multiple other factors, the RF neighborhood changes. Therefore, the actual range of service availability changes accordingly. Moreover, floor based or AP group based sharing is not flexible. In addition, the growing density of wireless devices in WLANs could lead to more than required, e.g. irrelevant servers, being discovered by unintended client devices. Hence, a practical and visual way of defining boundaries of physical regions for limiting the sharing of services rendered by servicing network devices would be desirable.